It seems that the romance of a royal wedding still has the power to give joy to hundreds of millions of ordinary people. While TV Channels had record ratings for their coverage of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the online viewing figures are out, and they are equally impressive

YouTube, which had created a dedicated Royal Wedding Channel, has released its figures

“The Royal Wedding was live streamed 72 million times around the world to 188 countries. Those who didn’t see it live still had an opportunity to don their fascinators and catch up with the re-broadcasts later in the day. When it was all said and done, the total streams on April 29, 2011 reached 101 million as romantics around the globe tuned in to watch the fairytale ceremony, the procession and the final balcony kiass.

And what a kiss it was…during the 10 seconds around the highly-anticipated Royal kiss, the YouTube channel site, powered by Google App Engine, experienced an additional 100,000 requests on top of the already high load … an effective additional 10,000 requests per second.“

This is especially impressive considering the fact that most of the people who have broadband have access to TV as well. For a number of reasons, 72 million people chose, or were forced to, see it live on YouTube.